Noah Feldman, Columnist

The Justice Department Is Headed Down a Dangerous Path

The investigations and counterinvestigations involving Jeff Sessions and Andrew McCabe are destroying faith in federal law enforcement.

March 22, 2018 at 2:31 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

The plot thickens.
Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images

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Before Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe for alleged dishonesty, McCabe led an investigation of Sessions for, well, dishonesty. This may or may not be proof of wrongdoing in McCabe’s firing. Sessions’s lawyer says the investigation of the attorney general, which was continued by special counsel Robert Mueller, is over; it’s at least possible that Sessions didn’t know that McCabe was the one investigating him.

Regardless, Wednesday’s revelation by ABC News is a further step in the gradual collapse of the ideal of depoliticized criminal investigation in the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That the attorney general and a member of the FBI leadership were mutually investigating each other should be the stuff of a “Homeland” episode, not front-page news in a real, functioning democracy.